Sprout - multimedia marketing made (too?) easy
Adrian McDermott
April 22nd, 2008
Sprout is a really easy-to-use online WYSIWYG editor for Flash, started in January 2008 and now released in a public beta that is free to download and works with IE, Firefox and Safari. Templates make it easy to publish and manage widgets, mini-sites, banners, and mashups using components from PollDaddy, Google, Ribbit, ChipIn, and others. Publishing is simple. You get the code to copy into your website, or use a quick post feature to place in a blog or social network.
Sprout could be a great help to entertainment promotion, both for bands and for cool gadgets. The problem I foresee is the ‘more is more’ principle. Just as a previous generation started to use every Photoshop and Illustrator trick on every headline and graphic, will we end up with overdone and amateurish multimedia marketing everywhere we look? Probably best to take it gently for professional PR and marketing, but excellent for launching and changing lightweight campaigns fast. And, as you can also track the number of views and the number of times it is copied, great for seeding and reseeding viral campaigns.
Sprout also includes an SDK to add new features, and has taken off hugely. It could become one of the web’s fastest ever acquisitions, and if so could serve as an object lesson in how to do it.
Tags: Sprout